The highly anticipated film "A Wrinkle in Time" directed byAva DuVernay has very big shoes to fill. "And they made these vibrant, really, really glorious films during a certain era", she said.

StarringStorm Reid (who you might recognize from 2016's Sleight) as Meg Murry, the film is incredibly ambitious in trying to show both the extravagant beauty of the universe and the infinitesimal detail of one girl's loneliness. They're theoretical scientists who once lectured as a team - mom going micro, meaning the atomic particles. Their time here is the most visually interesting of the film, especially the scene of scarily alike children bouncing the same balls at the same moment outside the same houses. Rather than enduring the oppressive rules of time and space, we could wrinkle it - 91 billion light years traveled like that.

It begins well. Meg and her younger, "different" brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), live with their physicist mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, excellent and warmly empathetic) in Los Angeles. Which, Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling). On their journey, they meet a sassy seer (Zach Galifianakis) and a red-eyed puppet (Michael Peña). But there is something clumsy about the creature Whatsit turns into: a green flying carpet that looks like a blade of grass attached to an animated version of Witherspoon's face.

Three years later, her film "13th" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Here is a girl who wishes she were different than she is, which is just another way of saying she wishes she were the same as everyone else.

MONDELLO: All right then.

When Wrinkle is firing on all cylinders, it's a transporting adventure that brings you back to the imaginative adventure of childhood, when the stakes were clear, and always high. So Meg, Charles Wallace and another kid from school trip through that wardrobe - I'm sorry - I mean wrinkle and land in a place where if you're looking for your dad.

There's a powerful message about female empowerment, as embodied by the determined and soulful Meg, amidst the larger theme that in a universe of infinite possibilities, there is still a need to embrace the simpler things, like kindness and love.

MONDELLO:.You ask the flowers - a whole field of gorgeous, floating butterfly-like critters. I kept expecting a big reveal that would wrap these insane frayed ends together and help the story make sense to me, but it never came. (Laughter) Oh, really? Yep, he was here.

Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. No one's likely to do that this time. "For a while, independent movies were the home to diverse talent".

REID: (As Meg) Do you trust me? Young McCabe is also very good as the cerebral Charles and Miller is impressive as Meg's would-be boyfriend, Calvin.

MONDELLO: That Meg is African-American and a girl and enveloped in a world of unremarked-upon diversity are all virtues to be celebrated.

Watching "A Wrinkle in Time", I kept thinking about Spike Jonze's 2009 film adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are", a movie many loathed because of the stuff that wasn't straight out of the picture book original.